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Dublin Core
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Celebration
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Speeches from the Celebration of Roy's Life, December 9, 2007, George Mason University, Arlington campus, Arlington, VA.
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I am Betsy Blackmar, and I am one of the many people in this room who arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the early 1970s very uncertain as to what exactly we were doing. Roy helped us figure that out. What do you do when you don’t know what you are doing? You organize a reading group; you form a collective to produce a journal, you make sure that all of your friends know each other—whether in person or as legends. You give other people drafts of your work to read and read theirs and talk to them. Roy helped us all collectively to gain the confidence to do our creative work, and he helped many of us find jobs, housing, roommates, and life-long friends. Given Roy’s faith in mutuality and reciprocity, it matters to me to think that I may have given him back one thing: he met Deborah at a party at my Cambridge apartment. (of course, given the principles of six degrees of separation on which he operated, they were destined to meet one way or another). And Deborah gave Roy back to us all a hundred fold by sharing his hospitality and wit, and, over the years,—I think it took a long time-- helping him see that he could do even more if he didn’t stay up all night or live on chocolate donuts and Tab or drive himself to exhaustion; she even taught Roy to take vacations, which just seems like a miracle.
Roy recruited me to help write a short screen play for a short documentary by Richard Broadman on Boston’s parks. Then, he suggested that we write a short book on Central Park. The thing is, the story was more complicated, there were more layers, we really needed to bring it up to the present, so more than six years and 600 pages later, we finished the Park and the People. But we would not have been able to do this had Roy not figured out the magic key to grant writing: all of our proposals started with a Johnny Carson joke from the mid-1960s—“It was so quiet last night in Central Park, that you could have heard a knife drop.” It was followed somewhere in the proposal by another one, “Did you hear the Soviet ambassador was mugged in Central Park last night? The park commissioner said it was an exceptional case: ‘it’s the first time they got a Russian’.” I never knew where Roy found these Johnny Carson jokes, but who else but Roy would recognize that someone sitting reading fifty pleas for money would be desperate for some comic relief? Of course, being Roy, he also compiled and analyzed all the crime statistics of the 1960s to prove that it was safer to be in the park than on the streets of New York.
It was not always easy to collaborate with Roy. It was not just the damn to-do lists and the feeling that you could never keep up with him. It was Roy’s honesty: you just couldn’t tell Roy white lies about why you hadn’t done something you said you would do. I don’t think Roy hated a lot of things, but I do think he really really disliked cowardly self-serving white lies and excuses. He also didn’t have much use for pomposity, grandiosity, arrogance, or abuses of power.
There is only one time when I think Roy was actually relieved that I didn’t follow through on something: for his 40th birthday, just after we finished the park book, I gave him a trowel and the promise of 100 daffodil bulbs. I had arranged to have the bulbs shipped to my house in Carmel, but, as it turned out, I didn’t travel to Washington that Fall, so I ended up planting them in my yard: he never asked me what happed to his opportunity to become a gardener.
When I think of Roy now, I think of that little crinkle and light in his eyes when he was telling or hearing a good story. I think of the pleasure of sharing Roy’s and Deborah’s stories of the Human Comedy. It is probably because he recognized and so readily forgave the foibles of his friends, his colleagues, his students, that Roy was able to help so many of us muddle through and collectively hold each other up through so many bad things, political and personal, of which surely one of the hardest is losing Roy himself.
Okay: no tears, no hugging, but here’s a lesson Roy would have allowed: start your grant proposals with a joke.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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155
Language
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eng
Creator
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Betsy Blackmar
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Betsy Blackmar
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Document
central park
friends
roy
think
time
-
Document
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I’ve learned so much from reading all the entries here, but it’s also reinforced what we all already knew—Roy was a unique, wonderful person who enriched the lives of many hundreds of people through friendship and personal contact, as well as hundreds of thousands of people through his work. I want to add in four ideas:
1. ROY WAS A LIFELONG FRIEND. Because so many of his friendships started with collaborative work projects, it would be easy to assume that his friendships required work relationships. But instead, Roy maintained close friendships with individuals he first met in elementary school, junior high, high school, college, his time in England, and elsewhere. I don’t know anyone else who remained connected to so many earlier parts of his or her life. When you became a friend with Roy, he became your friend for life. He was able to do this because of his tremendous energy, his generosity, and his sincere interest in other people, their experiences, and their ideas.
2. ROY KNEW HOW TO HAVE FUN. Yes, he worked long hours and may not have relaxed as much as most people, but he also knew how to have fun away from work. He loved movies and he was always interested in trying new experiences. During graduate school, when he was writing about working class leisure, a group of us decided to expand our leisure-time horizons and try out various modern recreational pursuits we hadn’t previously tried, or hadn’t done since childhood. We rode the largest wooden roller coaster in Massachusetts, played skee ball, went candlepin bowling, watched harness racing, attended professional wrestling matches, bet on jai alai, and more. Roy was open to a wide range of experience and got enjoyment from all of it, never looking down on any of it.
3. ROY TRIED TO SQUEEZE THE MOST OUT OF A DAY. As many people have written, Roy was well known for multi-tasking in order to accomplish more than the rest of us could in a given hour or day. When he was in graduate school, he tried a unique strategy in order to get more done. For a time when he was working on his dissertation, he had no teaching or other tasks that had to be done at a set time, so either consciously or unconsciously he began living on a 26-hour-a-day schedule. Every day he would work a couple of hours later and stay up a couple of hours later. On Monday, he might go to sleep at 1 and get up at 8. Then on Tuesday, he would go to sleep at 3 and get up at 10, and so on. Those of us in the apartment got used to seeing Roy eat breakfast at all hours of the day and night.
4. ROY WAS PART OF A STRONG PARTNERSHIP. Roy and Deborah made a great team. They complemented each other so well and brought out the best in each other. It was nice to watch them interact with each other. To those of us on the outside, they had a strong identity as a couple while giving each other room to have their individual interests and express their individual unique personalities. When visiting them, one would have three good experiences—one with Roy, one with Deborah, and one with the two of them together.
Roy was a great person and a great friend. As so many other people have observed, he made a significant difference in my life. He taught me important skills and lessons, he helped me succeed professionally, he brought me joy, and he was always there to help when I needed him.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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85
Title
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Four Thoughts about Roy
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Creator
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Warren Leon
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Warren Leon
Type
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Document
Deborah
friends
graduate school